counseled me without wounding my
vanity, and introduced me everywhere where I was likely to make friends
who would be useful to me in my future career. In my despair, an
intrigue of the most dangerous kind would perhaps have had its
attractions for me; but even peril was out of my reach. My inexperience
sent me back again to my solitude, where I dwelt face to face with my
thwarted desires.

"At last I formed a connection, at first a secret one, with a girl, whom
I persuaded, half against her will, to share my life. Her people were
worthy folk, who had but small means. It was not very long before she
left her simple sheltered life, and fearlessly intrusted me with a
future that virtue would have made happy and fair; thinking, no doubt,
that my narrow income was the surest guarantee of my faithfulness to
her. From that moment the tempest that had raged within me ceased, and
happiness lulled my wild desires and ambitions to sleep. Such happiness
is only possible for a young man who is ignorant of the world, who knows
nothing as yet of its accepted codes nor of the strength of prejudice;
but while it lasts, his happiness is as all-absorbing as a child's. Is
not first love like a return of childhood across the intervening years
of anxiety and toil?

"There are men who learn life at a glance, who see it for what it is at
once, who learn experience from the mistakes of others, who apply the
current maxims of worldly wisdom to their own case with signal success,
and make unerring forecasts at all times. Wise in their generation are
such cool heads as these! But there is also a luckless race endowed with
the impressionable, keenly-sensitive temperament of the poet; these are
the natures that fall into error, and to this latter class I belonged.
There was no great depth in the feeling that first drew me towards this
poor girl; I followed my instinct rather than my heart when I sacrificed
her to myself, and I found no lack of excellent reasons wherewith to
persuade myself that there was no harm whatever in what I had done. And
as for her--she was devotion itself, a noble soul with a clear, keen
intelligence and a heart of gold. She never counseled me other than
wisely. Her love put fresh heart into me from the first; she foretold a
splendid future of success and fortune for me, and gently constrained me
to take up my studies again by her belief in me. In these days there is
scarcely a branch of science that has no bearing upon me